Equal Opportunity Killing

Nancy Pelosi called this the “selfie of the year.” The self-esteem selfie of the first four women to make it through Marine infantry training. From Gawker:

These women have now definitively proven what fatuous Congressional oldsters for so long prevented other women from demonstrating: the ability to hump 90 pounds of gear over rough terrain for days; an aptitude for killing people with grenades, radioed-in air and artillery strikes, bare hands, and the M249 Light Machine Gun, which is not all that light; and a general comfort with serving at the tip of the spear, being first-in-last-out, and all the other man-meat-inspired metaphors for combat infantry service.

Private First Class Harlee “Rambo” Bradford says she likes “blowing shit up.” How admirable. Maybe she ought to stick to a chemistry set or get into pyrotechnics. Bradford, it is later mentioned, incurred a stress fracture from training. When you read about what that training entails, a smallish female body will endure far more than a stress fracture or two over time. Military brass keeps repeating that they are not lowering standards to get women into combat, yet the Business Insider notes the following:

The military services are struggling to figure out how to move women into battlefront jobs, including infantry, armor and elite commando positions. They are devising updated physical and mental standards — equal for men and women — for thousands of combat jobs and they have until Jan. 1, 2016, to open as many jobs as possible to women, and to explain why if they decide to keep some closed.

If standards don’t change, what exactly is the struggle? Here’s a photo that made the rounds back in October: one of the four girls is proudly displaying her “battle wound” – though I don’t believe the story of how it happened. In a fascinating article in the Marine Corps Gazette, Captain Katie Petronio asks all the right questions, including the following:

In the end, my main concern is not whether women are capable of conducting combat operations, as we have already proven that we can hold our own in some very difficult combat situations; instead, my main concern is a question of longevity. Can women endure the physical and physiological rigors of sustained combat operations, and are we willing to accept the attrition and medical issues that go along with integration?”

6 Responses to Equal Opportunity Killing

weak stream says:

December 1st, 2013 at 10:47 am

And, I guess, we can never grasp basic statistics. If you find statistically insignificant numbers of women that can conduct battlefield operations and ‘hump 90lb packs’ I say you haven’t discovered much. But they use the faulty logic to extrapolate what becomes a very large error. Looking for outliers to prove that the genders are the same has always been a mistake. The reality is that women can do many jobs that men do but they just don’t want to. That’s why you don’t see many up on high rises welding beams or pumping out cesspools, for that matter. Should we force all the girls to do what they otherwise don’t want to do to prove some idiot’s fantasy? Maybe that’s next.

David says:

December 4th, 2013 at 2:11 am

I have a slightly different angle on all of this, and that is the media’s hatred of femininity and campaign to masculinize women.

Ex.: The UFC created a women’s division last winter. The UFC president said the media gave the woman’s fight more attention than any other fight in their history. Consider that: two of the champs at that time, George St. Pierre and Anderson Silva were, by most objective standards, the greatest combat athletes in the history of the world (because the UFC does not give the champs “tomato cans” to pad their records).

And yet ESPN and sports media give them minimal coverage, but gleefully bump all their other stories to lead SportsCenter with a woman’s fight.

Another example: YouTube commentator RamzPaul made this video showing how the media is telling girls they’re not allowed to play with dolls and think about pretty things (the final 30s of the video is touching) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roE3e2b7w3s

The media truly wants a sexless, childless society….for whites. They still celebrate black and Mexican mothers.

weak stream says:

December 7th, 2013 at 7:02 am

David, to that point, the other day I was watching a Star Trek Next Generation episode from the ’90′s. In it they came across an ‘androgenous race’. The androgeny was self imposed/created. They considered gender elimination ‘evolution’. It seems that Star Trek has been calling trends for decades. What people don’t realize, because they don’t pay attention to the ‘street’, is that the younger generation girls are quite feminine and soft spoken. The older group may be creating publicity stunts but the younger generation clearly isn’t listening. The reversal of all this is coming.

David Smith says:

December 7th, 2013 at 11:24 am

I was against women in combat prior to my deployments to Iraq; I have become increasingly so since then. In fact I’d exclude them from all but the most particular and specialized jobs in the support arms, if then! Yes, indeed, whatever they say, standards have and will be changed in order to attain PC and social ends. Let me restate the blindingly obvious: War is hell! (a very true statement from an otherwise execrable human being, Wm. T. Sherman). Let me restate another blindingly obvious truth: Men and women are different! Because of both of these truths, if you actually determine that it’s time to go to war (No, not the evil Neocon/Progressive/Statist wars of the last 150 years or so), you do everything you can to do it efficiently, quickly, and in a manner that limits the damage to yourself and even to only the enemy’s ability to continue in his aggression against you. This cuts out any push for Jacobin objectives of equality, which have and will continue to work their evil on what’s left of our civilization, both in and out of the military sub-culture. Be careful, “ladies”, what you wish for! The equality you achieve won’t end well for you (or for any of the rest of us)!